[{"jcr:title":"Computer Science student participates in a project at the University of Illinois"},{"richText":"After spending three weeks on the campus of the American institution in Urbana-Champaign, João Alfredo Cardoso Lamy will continue participating in the initiative","authorDate":"08/08/2023 13h42","author":"Tiago Cordeiro","madeBy":"Por","title":"Computer Science student participates in a project at the University of Illinois","variant":"imagecolor"},{"jcr:title":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"themeName":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"containerType":"containerTwo"},{"jcr:title":"Grid Container Section","layout":"responsiveGrid"},{"text":"Born in São Paulo 20 years ago, João Alfredo Cardoso Lamy, a 4th-semester undergraduate student in Computer Science at Insper, arrived at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) campus on July 17. Over three weeks, he lived in a dormitory room with a desk that became his main workstation. He also moved around a lot, interacting with professors and students, visiting labs and libraries, and using one of the campus dining halls, which spans 25 square kilometers.   Lamy returned to Brazil on August 5. He was satisfied with the period during which he completed the University of Illinois' summer internship, an annual program aimed at providing direct interaction with the academic community of the Grainger College of Engineering.   "It was a very rich experience that allowed me to get to know the daily life of one of the most respected engineering schools in the world and immerse myself in research production," he says. This was his first completely solo travel—apart from an exchange period in Ottawa, Canada, where he stayed at a friend's house and only had to travel back alone.   Analysis of Communities   A Flamengo supporter due to family influence from Rio de Janeiro, Lamy made an effort to quickly acclimate and participate as productively as possible in the research he was selected for: the project "Meso-scale Structures in Large Graphs: Finding Communities with Substructure," one of the five projects developed in partnership between Insper and UIUC since September 2022, when the collaboration agreement between the two institutions began.   Conducted by Fábio Ayres and Charles Kirschbaum from Insper, and Tandy Warnow and George Chacko from UIUC, the research aims to analyze how groups form and connect using graphs—a field of mathematics that studies relationships between objects in a given set—as a tool. Initially, the work analyzes the interconnections between academic papers by examining how they cite each other. This approach can shed light on how scientific production is conducted and shared.   Lamy worked directly with George Chacko, who uses data science techniques to create detailed panoramas of the research community's structure and how knowledge diffusion occurs through the impact of articles and peer review. These techniques might eventually be applied to other forms of groupings.   "Chacko analyzes connections that will eventually reach 180 million nodes, or points of contact. I am contributing to the design and testing of codes, which need to be documented. The largest network of connections I have worked with had 3 million nodes. I tested different characteristics of clustering algorithms," says Lamy. "I learned from them to find patterns in a more rigorous way."   Continuity in Research   The student intends to continue the research from São Paulo, balancing it with his academic activities. "I plan to keep remotely contributing to the project under the supervision of Professor Fábio Ayres. And I want to return for the summer internship in 2024 to complete the full experience," he says—in 2023, the first year Insper sent two students to Illinois, documentation issues delayed the trip, and the experience, which was supposed to last ten weeks, ended up being shorter. "I made the most of the trip. I am already looking forward to the next visit to Illinois.""}]